1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for viewing search results.
2. Background of the Invention
The quantity of information on the world wide web (the “Web”) is staggering. And it increases every day. This vast sea of information provides a wealth of data to people willing to search for it. People must search for it because rarely do people know exactly the website that holds the data for which they are looking; most people instead know what kind of data for which they are looking, but not where it resides.
To aid people in their search for data, computer scientists implemented search engines. These search engines generally rely on keywords received from a user. To enter the right keywords, the user first thinks through the kind of data he is interested in and figures out what key words will likely be present in a website having such data (often with mixed success). A search engine, such as those used by Google™ or Altavista™, search many of the websites on the Web for these keywords.
For many keywords the user will receive thousands of websites. Thousands of websites are not useful. To reduce the number, users will typically hone their choice of keywords. After doing so, if the user is reasonably successful, the user will receive just hundreds of websites. Even if the user is fortunate enough to receive only fifty websites, the user must spend a lot of time manually verifying, one-by-one, each search result to see if it has the data in which he is interested.
Verifying search results is especially a problem because many current search engines present search results in views that are difficult for users to analyze. Most search engines display results in a view showing the Web address and a short piece of text containing the keywords (called a “description”), and in some cases a short summary of the website. These views can be difficult to analyze, in part because many users have no choice but to, manually and laboriously, verify that the website contains data in which he is interested by reading each Web address, the few words surrounding the keywords, and, in some cases, the short summary. Even with this effort, often users cannot accurately verify that the website is of interest without visiting the websites, further wasting their time.